BEA: We already talked about this. The part where he calls someone a “New Yorker friend.”

JIM: Yes. That killed me. It’s amazing they’re still publishing that sort of nonsense. It’s so far past self-parody at this point…

BEA: And still they persist. I know.

JIM: I guess there’s some sort of internal obligation there to let the self-consciously old old boys publish self-consciously old-boy pieces twice a year or something. I feel like it’s self-perpetuating, but maybe once the people who were friends with “Bill Shawn” are all dead those pieces won’t be published anymore… Even some of the old-boy Salinger stuff I found noxious. I don’t know. They should just ask themselves, at every turn, is there any reason whatsoever for an avg reader to give half a fuck about whatever elite country-club bullshit we’re talking about

BEA: Lilian Ross is exempt from that. I mean, her piece was genuinely interesting, in light of Salinger’s death. I don’t mind her calling him “Bill Shawn.” And the Angell piece, if you edit out all the pip-pip wing-tip garbage, was pretty fascinating

JIM: OK, OK, OK, OK

BEA: I wonder if your reaction to this stuff is so strong because you grew up in the guest-room of a Davos Chalet

JIM: Probably. You look remarkably similar to CEE.

BEA: Nonsense.

[Thirty years later. Two twenty-eight year olds stand before the gates of the university.]

JOMMS: I heard you’re teaching a class on food and sex this semeseter, is that right?

CHAUNA: No, that’s not right. I’m teaching a class, called The Carnality of Cuisine, about the eroticism encoded in the texts of different vegetarian recipes, going back to Brillat-Savarin up through Bittman, Madison, et al